Free Culture Timeline

The World is Changing (release candidate 2: 23/04/2016)

A brief timeline of global free culture (FC)

Intro: This timeline follows what I see as key milestones in the developments of the internet (see Hobbes' Internet Timeline for more milestones specific to internet development), the web, free code software (see also the interactive linux timeline), open source development methodology, and free culture itself, including the open access and open education movements. Curiously, all of these actually developed in parallel in many ways. CreativeCommons was inspired by the licenses of the free software and open source movement(s), which would not be what it is today without the emergence of the internet and the web, yet the very oldest entry on this timeline is a free culture distribution repository; Project Gutenberg. I could go further back, to the invention of the first digital computers, the telephone, the telegraph, even Gutenberg's printing press or the invention of writing itself, but every historical timeline has to start somewhere, and the Project Gutenberg e-library seems like a suitable candidate.

1971

1975

1976

Vint Cerf and Robert Khan develop IPv4, one of the key protocols of the TCP/IP suite which is the basis for the public internet now being slowly superseded by IPv6, which allows for billions more unique IP addresses

1977

First release of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX), which became the base for a range of free code operating systems, including OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and as well as providing some components of Darwin, the core of the proprietary MacOSX and iOS

1980

1981

August: IBM announces the launch of the first IBM Personal Computer (PC). Other computer manufacturers reversed engineered the PC architecture to create "IBM-compatibles" (informally called "clones"), leading to the rise of the Microsoft-dominated "PC" platform, and in response, the proposal for the GNU Project in 1985.

October 4: Free Software Foundation (FSF) founded (Laid out the vision for the GNU operating system, which was the genesis of Linux, and authored the GNU General Public License, the first libre software license)

1986

Free Software Definition - first version published in first issue of the FSF newsletter 'GNU's Bulletin'

1990

Dec 25: Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau carry out first successful HTTP data exchange over the internet

1991

August 6: Public debut of World Wide Web on alt.hypertext UseNet group

August 14: arXiv, the Open Access repository for scholarly articles created by Paul Ginsparg, a professor of physics, computing, and information science at Cornell University, goes online for the first time. "Although arXiv.org only switched to GNU/Linux in 1997, it started using Perl in 1994, and Apache as soon as it was available. Later on, other open source programs were used, including TeX, GhostScript and MySQL." - Glyn Moody

September: Release of first version of Linux kernel announced by Linus Torvalds

1993

August 16: Debian project founded by Ian Murdock - the only major GNU/Linux distribution by a noncommercial entity. Debian was sponsored by the FSF during its Initial development. Documents written for Debian in 1997 by Bruce Perens become the basis for the Open Source Definition.

1996

IPv6 adopted by the Internet Engineering Taskforce. A 1999 TechWeb article by Bill Frezza expresses privacy concerns about the inclusion of network card manufacturer and address in packets sent over the internet using IPv6, but a 2007 article in Free Software Magazine by Gary Richmond claims that this identifiable address is for secure applications (such as online banking transactions) and another address system is available for anonymous browsing.

July 5: Version 1.0 of Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines ratified by the Debian Community

August: GNOME project initiated to create an entirely free (GPL) alternative to KDE, which initially depended on a proprietary toolkit called Qt. Qt gradually migrated to free licenses, with all ports finally being licensed under the GPL in version 4.0, released in June 2005

November 28: Gunther Eysenbach publishes an article in the British Medical Journal describing the need for an online service that allows authors to permanently archive web pages cited in articles, leading to the development of WebCite

OpenContent launched by David Wiley. OC was aforerunner of CC. Released 'open content license' and later the 'open publication license'. License work was abandoned when CC took off. OpenContent changed direction to focus on open education

1999

March 16: Darwin 2.0 released - this OS incorporates major parts of BSD and GNU operating systems, and forms the base of MacOSX

June: Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker launch the original Napster, the first peer-to-peer file-sharing system aimed at sharing music in mp3 compression format

Oct: Cathedral and the Bazaar book published by O'Reilly - the first print publication to use the Open Publication License

Nov 17: Sourceforge.net launched - hosting service for open source development projects

Nov 30 1999: first Indymedia.org site goes live for the 'Battle of Seattle'

2000

July 19: Sun Microsystems announced the release of StarOffice source code (later to become OpenOffice.org, and then LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice), initally under GNU Lesser GPL and their own SISSL

Oct 13: OpenOffice.org goes live, as the development community for the released StarOffice source

Jello Biafra - 'Become the Media' spoken word album

Around 30,000 researchers sign the Public Library of Science pledge, saying they won't work with journals that don't engage in delayed open access. The giant journal publishers mostly call their bluff, and "not many of those 30,000 scientists followed through on their pledge to boycott titles, and the whole exercise turned into a rather embarrassing failure." - Glyn Moody, ArsTechnica

October 31: Science journal publishes an article 'Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References', which leads to the revival of WebCite. According to Wikipedia, "Lawrence Lessig... used WebCite in his amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court case of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd."­

December: "UK's House of Commons science and technology committee launched an inquiry into scientific publishing, including the question whether the government should support open-access journals." - Glyn Moody

Swarthmore Coalition for the Digital Commons is formed. SCDC will become the first chapter of Students for Free Culture

2004

July: UK's House of Commons science and technology committee recommends government funding agencies require open access to publicly-funded research through "institutional repositories" ("green open access" - Stevan Harnad), and study funding the publication in open access journal ("gold open access" - Harnad).

October 20: Canonical Inc. release first version of Ubuntu - a Debian-based distribution of GNU/ Linux with a focus on user-friendliness

2005

May 1: OpenDocument (.odt) approved as a OASIS consortium standard

June: Research Councils UK, the largest research funding body in the UK, announced it would require open access to all research it funds.

June: Version 4.0 of Qt released, with all ports (Unix-like, MacOSX, Windows etc) licensed under GPL. All components of the KDE desktop are now free software according to the FSF definition.

June: Development begins on the Pure:Dyne multimedia linux distribution, initially a fork of Dyne:bolic, then of Ubuntu, which received funding from Arts Council England. Funding ended, and the project folded, releasing its last version in 2010. However, their work has been continued by the official Ubuntu derivative, Ubuntu Studio, which released its first version in 2007, and is still actively developed.

2006

February: WikiEducator launched by Dr Wayne Mackintosh, as a collaborative platform for professional educators releasing their course designs and other learning tools as Open Educational Resources (OER)

August 10: The entire editorial board of the academic journal Topology resigns, in protest at the publisher Elsevier's high subscriptions charges and opposition to open access, and the effects of this on the reputation of the journal.

2007

March: CERN proposes the creation of the “Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics” (SCOAP), which would fund an open acess model for the main journals publishing high-energy physics papers

May 11: Ubuntu Studio releases its first version, based on Ubuntu 7.04.

June: "The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, one of the largest endowed medical research foundations in the world, announced an open-access requirement for the research it funded." - Glyn Moody

August: Peer-Direct Projects Centre (FreeNode stewardship body) shifts its administrative base to the UK, where it is incorporated as a limited liability company

2010

2011

February 23: Inaugural meeting to create protocols for the Open Educational Resource University (OERu - renamed to OER Universitas on December 18 2013), a project spearheaded by the OER Foundation. The goal is for learners undertaking courses of self-study using OER to be able to apply for formal academic credits from existing educational institutions.

18 April: Vince D releases NameCoin, software for operating a distributed Domain Name Service using the BitCoin protocol - released under the MIT license, as part of the Dot-Bit project.

25 July: Dr. Andreas Gal, Director of Research at Mozilla Corporation, announced the "Boot to Gecko" Project on the mozilla.dev.platform mailing list, a project which would eventually become the FirefoxOS operating system for handheld computers ("smartphones".

September: Sci-Hub established by Alexandra Elbakyan as a guerilla open access repository of academic papers in any field.

October: UK government sets up a "working group on expanding access to published research findings", chaired by Dame Janet Finch, and informally known as the "Finch Group".

2012

June: Finch report published, concluding that "the UK should embrace the transition to open access, and accelerate the process in a measured way which promotes innovation but also what is most valuable in the research communications ecosystem."

June: PeerJ open access journal launched, backed by "open source" advocate and publisher of free software manuals under ARR copyright, Tim O'Reilly. Researchers who pay a one-off lifetime subscription to the journal can publish one article a year with no further fee.

June 6: World IPv6 Launch Day results in a massive increase in the number of internet servers supporting version 6 of the Internet Protocol (IP), created to allow a massive increased in the number of unique addresses which can be connected to the public internet.

July 2: "Boot to Gecko" renamed FirefoxOS, and "Device manufacturers TCL Communication Technology (under the Alcatel One Touch brand) and ZTE today announced their intentions to manufacture the first devices" for it.

October: Official launch of SCOAP (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) open access funding initiative

October: Ubuntu releases version 12.10, including the first part of an adware system called "Scopes", the Amazon Lens, described as spyware by FSF founder Richard Stallman. Despite a massive outcry from software freedom advocates, the Amazon Lens remains a part of Ubuntu until 16.04.

2013

February: directive on open access issued by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, saying it "hereby directs each federal agency with over $100 million in annual conduct of research and development expenditures to develop a plan to support increased public access to the results of research funded by the federal government." This directive still allowed a 12 month embargo on open access.

November: founding of bioRxiv, an open access "pre-print" respository similar to arXiv, but for the biological sciences.

2015

November: Following the example of Topology, the entire editorial board of prominent academic journal Lingua resign en masse in protest against the publisher's attempts to stymie full open access, planning to set up their own open access journal.

December 8: Mozilla cans FireFoxOS, giving up on its web-native mobile OS in the face of stiff competition from other open source mobile OS including Android, UbuntuPhone, and SailFish.

December 10: mathematician Tim Gower, an early signatory to Cost of Knowledge, an Open Access pledge, announces the launch of Discrete Analysis. This is an open access, peer-reviewed mathematics journal, novel in that "it will be purely an arXiv overlay journal. That is, rather than publishing, or even electronically hosting, papers, it will consist of a list of links to arXiv preprints."

Canonical announces that Ubuntu 16.04 will have its Scopes adware turned off by default, although still installed by default, so many software freedom advocates remain hesitant to endorse Ubuntu.

(note: need to add month and days where possible, in some cases more details of why each item is pivotal to the development of the FC, and links to references. Much of this information was sourced from Wikipedia, and where it is not referenced there, we can add references to both this page and relevant Wikipedia pages. Need to come up with a set of tags "free code", "open source", "open access" , "open publishing/ citizen journalism" etc and tag each item on the list appropriately. I envisage this eventually being presented as a timeline graphic, or maybe a slideshow, where data points can be separated out by tags)